Since the 1970's, the United States has passed numerous federal and state laws stipulating elaborate and often costly processes for the study and cleanup of environmental media (soil, surface water, groundwater, and/or air) impaired by hazardous chemicals. These processes often become large and complex.
Due to prolonged periods of site investigation and cleanup which generally coincide with changes of personnel in the property owner's organization, project consultants, and regulatory agencies, many hard-earned site studies, environmental data and/or reports are partial, fragmented and at times redundant in scope, paper bound, and not available to the entire project team. Moreover, these data and documents very often are in various forms (text, spreadsheets, drawings, photos, etc) and stored in multiple databases, in different formats, with different versions and usually without any standards. Prior to the present system, software applications that perform discrete sets of functions have been developed separately in the market. However, site data has to be specially processed in order to meet input requirements of each of these applications. These separate applications are not compatible and therefore cannot be integrated to provide users with a thorough assessment of the entire site.
The above-stated situations render the environmental data, that cost millions of dollars to collect, of little value to the property owners. Using existing applications, property owners cannot use the environmental data to their full advantage. The inaccessibility of project data, the lack of a centralized project data/information repository system, and the inability to identify impediments to site closure commonly forces the responsible parties to spend more money than should be necessary in the remedial investigation and site cleanup. This in turn hinders the overall project goals and delays site closure. Ultimately, these factors slow down the progress of cleaning up hazardous waste contaminated sites at both the state and national levels.
Until the below described embodiments, there has been no all-in-one application, web-based or desktop, capable of performing Query, Analysis, Data Visualization, Health Risk Assessment, Remediation Technology Screening and Remediation Cost Estimation sequentially or concurrently using a single uniform database.